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Colo. Voters Will Consider Legalizing Marijuana

February 28, 2012
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Colorado voters will decide this fall whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use when the state becomes the second in the nation to put such a proposal on ballots this year, reports the Associated Press.

The Secretary of State's Office said Monday that supporters of the legalization initiative collected enough signatures to get their measure before voters, meaning Colorado will join Washington state in putting a recreational pot question on November ballots.

Voters will be asked whether adults older than 21 should be allowed to use marijuana even without a doctor's recommendation. The measure would allow adults to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana or six marijuana plants. The proposal also allows for commercial pot sales, though cities and counties would have permission to ban marijuana sales if they chose.

Comments (10)

WHY, for the love of The Father in Heaven, is it illegal to make recreational use out of a plant that grows wild over most of the nation.

Rick @ 2/29/2012 9:27 AM

Jack must not know the facts about weed, why it's dangerous and how it kills people. I live in CA where the weed dispensaries are being taken over by organized crime. Police magazine did an article about it. One small town away from me an idiot driver was high and ran off the road killing a photographer that was taking pictures of models along the road. The guy that wrote the medical marijuana law admitted after it passed to being a gay activist and a drug legalization activist. He said that legalizing weed was the first step in legalizing all drugs. Their cry is to legalize it, it doesn't hurt anyone, it's about their freedom and it will free up law enforcement. It does hurt the smoker, whoever is in the room with the doper and when the doper is high, they can and do kill others. Obviously with organized crime taking over here in CA, it will happen other places too, so that argument is a moot point. Yeah, it will free up cops to go after other crimes, but let's just legalize those crimes; robbery, rape, extortion and let the criminals know that any citizen can shoot them on sight for commiting these acts without fear of prosecution, because that's been legalized too.

Capt David-Ret LA County @ 2/29/2012 5:36 PM

Good move for Colorado. Save millions in jail costs. The state should even grow it and market it. Make millions more..

Charlie @ 2/29/2012 6:11 PM

I'm with Rick, I hear the remark all the time about it grows naturally, really?. There is none in my yard or around me. Make it legal, you might as well make all crimes legal and just do away with any kind of Police Force, give anybody a gun and tell them to fend for them self.

Lee @ 2/29/2012 6:30 PM

Rick...Charlie...You sound petty talking about a plant that ( I also live in Cali) I have yet to see kill anyone by any means of overdose etc. Alcohol is lethal around .3 BAC, Yet you're not ranting on about that. Yes there are driving intoxicated accidents, all the time from alcohol and drug use. Legalizing it will not change that statistical data! Driving High is still DUI...an arrestable offense...You also speak of organized crime and its involvement in the marijuana culture....Do you think that if it is legal, organized crime will have anything to do with it? If it is in demand, then these gangs supply, yet if it can be purchased at a gas station like a pack of cigarettes, then there is no need for that supply and demand chain....Get it? Also, if it is legalized, and the state itself partakes by taxing it...who loses? You still have to be 21, you still cant drive intoxicated, and you can only have 1 ounce....It is not a move to legalize rape, cocaine, and robbery. Don't be such petty persons, look at the big picture and how it will help stimulate the economy. wether it's legal or not, it will remain in the honeycomb of society....So get over it.

Charlie @ 3/1/2012 3:47 PM

Lee, I have seen people die over it. Tax it and stimulate the economy?, everybody would be to high to know what they are doing and the influence it already has on the children is shame enough.

Ron @ 6/29/2012 8:37 PM

Lee............if you haven't noticed, no one has died of a overdose to nicotine either and yet we see over 400,000 people die each year because of the terrible damage tobacco does to the human at a horrenous cost to the taxpayer of over $200B/yr while getting only $20B in tax recipts..........and, we know that marijuana smoke has tons more carcinogens than tobacco smoke......& yes, marijuana does cause cancer. Your argument doesn't hold water.

Ron @ 6/29/2012 8:45 PM

Please give HIDTA Director Tom Gorman my regards and here is more information for the Folks to consider:

"Marijuana is a substance that contains up to 360 active brain chemicals in every variety a person smokes. We found that just one of those chemicals, Delta-9 THC, thought to be the most potent and causing the greatest amount of brain effects, is altered by the liver.

The liver tries to destroy this drug and get rid of it but in the process, it actually creates 60 or more new drugs that are active in the brain.

So marijuana is a multitude of drugs."

"There is marijuana growing everywhere with a very high potency of 14-20% THC. To fully understand importance of this, we must realize that people who smoked in the 1960s thought marijuana was a benign drug.

Smoking one joint today is the equivalent of smoking about 14 of those joints from the '60s. Thus, we have a much greater concern about the health consequences of today's marijuana."

"The big problem we see at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic is that the potent form of marijuana today is causing a lot more problems than we saw in the 1960s. I never treated a single self-admitted marijuana addict in the Clinic from the early '60s through the mid-'80s.

However, by the late-1980s we started seeing people coming in saying, "Help me.

I want to stop smoking pot. It is causing me to have memory problems.

Causing me to be too spaced out. Not to function in my work. I can't complete tasks. It's causing me to be sick in the morning and cough. I have withdrawal symptoms.

I want to stop and I can't stop."

We now have at our program in San Francisco about 100 new patients every month who are in treatment specifically for marijua

Ron @ 6/29/2012 9:28 PM

To Jack Betz,

You must have marijuana confused with Poison Oak or Poison Ivy......fact is, marijuana is not found growing wildly any where in our nation. I would suggest that instead of you smoking marijuana you might want to try smoking Poison "Oak or Ivy", after all they both are natural plants from GOD........we would all like to know how your experience turns out!

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